


Ignominiously Incognito Among Ignorants

by yakalskovich



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-X3, mention of suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 08:11:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yakalskovich/pseuds/yakalskovich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After losing both his powers and Charles, Erik Lehnsherr is condemned to go on living as a nobody.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <span class="small">The 'Major Character Death' refers to canon, happens before the fic, and canonically isn't permanent.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	Ignominiously Incognito Among Ignorants

_Ignominiously incognito among ignorants.-_

That’s how Erik describes his situation. Or would describe, if there was anybody to describe it to, which is not the case. Erik is living powerlessly in a Charles-less word, and honestly, he can’t say which part of these is worse.

He’d throw in the towel, but he hasn’t survived all he has to give up now. He’s killed quite a number of people, too, but won’t end that streak by killing himself. Also, he still wants to see what happens next, even if there’s no Charles left to talk to about it. To gloat about it, to sneer at it, to argue into the night until...

So, Erik goes to the park and plays chess with strangers instead. Going to the park and doing things with strangers is a time-honoured thing, is it not? He can argue politics with ex-mobsters, disparage technology with Vietnam vets, and chat about sports with old hippies. He’s just another old man in a too-large coat with a cap like he’d worn when he was young, and grey eyes that yet instil fear when they’re not looking lost and bewildered, like those of old people will.

Erik sees his eyes in the mirror and disapproves.

He’s got a mirror, and a modest roof over his head, and proper news _papers_ and solid books (as well as a used Stark pad and the Wifi code of his neighbours in exchange for feeding their cat when they go on a trip), he keeps up with the world even if it’s really annoying he can’t mess with it any more. He can reach just enough of his formerly vast funds to lead the life of an indigent old age pensioner, and has no means to make any demands of anybody ever again.

If he claimed that he used to be the infamous Magneto, people would most likely laugh at him.

Erik sometimes goes to a community center where young bright-eyed volunteers serve hot meals to old people, and as he passes as old people now, they fill him a plate and let him donate in jar or not, for his food, but only if he can afford it? And there’s a free clinic in the back room every Thursday.

So it’s Thursday, and somebody shooes Erik to have his blood pressure and blood sugar and whatnot measured by some bright-eyed medical students, and that’s where it happens. Erik pulls up his sleeve as instructed, even though something (more than one thing, actually) in him balks at all this, the herding of people and the doctors doing them one after the other. The line of unhappy, slightly smelly humanity sits very wrong both with the Shoah survivor and the mutant leader that he used to be. Erik pulls up his sleeve, and the students exchange Looks, and one of them steps aside with her cell phone.

Erik must extricate himself very carefully, as not to cause a stir and draw attention to himself. He can’t set the cutlery on people any more; he can’t even feel the cutlery now, in his sadly diminished state.

He goes back to the main room when they’re done with him to finish his meal and pick up his book and then quietly leave in due course, but she arrives even before he’s done with his dinner. She is young and red-haired and very pretty in an old-fashioned way, and she walks right up to him and introduces herself as something Oppenheimer, some somewhat long and complex Hebrew first name he repeats once and then forgets.

“I don’t want to intrude, Mr …?”

“Eisenhardt. Max Eisenhardt,” Erik supplies one of his most time-honoured aliases.

“Mr. Eisenhardt, but you’re a survivor, they told me, and you come here often?”

“I am,” Erik says, annoyed already.

A survivor of very many things.

“We may have a proposition for you,” Oppenheimer says. On principle, Erik always calls her (and thinks of her) as Oppenheimer, afterwards. She has this goody-two-shoes idealism and cheerful resolve combined with an iron-trap determination, just the sort he used to adore and loathe in Charles in turn, back when there still was a Charles.

She works for a foundation that runs a Jewish home for old folks, she informs him, and they are not abandoning a survivor of the Shoah to the soup kitchens.

Erik raises an eyebrow and gives her a cold look, perfected for decades, and then his nastiest grin (also perfected for decades) as he eats the next forkful of his meatloaf. He’s not religious, and he won’t tell tales of suffering to the next generation. Tales of suffering, he concludes to himself, that would only ever end in a lie.

He suspects she wouldn’t even appreciate hearing the number of Nazis he’s killed between ‘45 and ‘62.

Oppenheimer isn’t easily deterred. Erik suspects she’s running out of Shoah survivors for her foundation. Anybody who actually remembers the camps is now incredibly ancient. Of course, the number tattooed in his forearm sent the volunteer to her phone immediately.

No strings attached, Oppenheimer promises, a warm room and three square meals a day if he doesn’t mind they’re kosher, and company of like-minded people if he wants it.

Erik doubts that there ever even were like-minded people, and the only one who ever came close (or counted at all) is dead, but he doesn’t say so to the annoying girl who’s not even forty yet, if he’s not mistaken. What’s she doing investing her energy in the past like this, anyway?

He moves in not a week afterwards. The home is in several old town houses connected by courtyards and corridors that the fire inspectors probably aren’t happy with (heavy iron doors in the former walls between houses, heavy iron doors always open, heavy iron doors that Erik can’t even feel any more), and there are always vacancies now, old people rattling around in walls that are too big for them, like their clothes. In a few years, all who remember will be gone, and the foundation will probably shut down. The future holds other problems, other causes. One day, Erik muses, there will have to be nursing homes for aged mutants.

There are chess players among the old people, of course, and there are free newspapers and a library and free Wifi that is mostly used by the volunteers. But there is quite a number of people that will still try new things after a lifetime of changes and ideas, and there’s a computer everyone can use in the common room, and there’s always somebody using it.

Erik plays chess, eats his meals with a book, ignores the ancient crones that try to flirt with him, and hardly ever allows Oppenheimer to rope him into community activity, which is of course always dreadful, annoying, and simply too cloying for words. Whoever thought it was a good idea to make old people play simple games, like children? To keep them active? Please.

Oppenheimer is nearly as impervious to Erik’s disdain as Charles used to be.

It’s a Thursday when she finds him in the conservatory, one of the home’s many elderly cats on his lap while he reads a book in Russian. It’s Bulgakov; he never fails to make Erik laugh as his opinion of mankind can be dark enough for Erik’s liking. Oppenheimer cheerfully announces that it’s games and gymnastics in half an hour, and would Erik (whom she calls Max) please come as she needs an even number of people for what she’s planning to do?

Erik has practiced being intentionally rude for most of his life, but he fails to do so, for some reason, with people like that.

So Erik finds himself in the little gym standing in a circle being made to throw balls at decrepit old people according to some arcane rules he doesn’t even really bother to pay much attention to, as Oppenheimer repeats them at every turn anyway. “No, if you get the red ball you say your own first name and then walk counter-clockwise, it’s the green ball where you say the last name of the person you’re throwing at!” she explains, trying not to get exasperated.

“You need to make up some less complex rules that even morons can understand,” Erik murmurs. Somebody throws a ball at him. “Max!” Oppenheimer scowls at Erik; she’s heard him.

Erik catches the ball, determined to never take part in anything like this again, no matter how nicely Oppenheimer can smile, and no matter who her cheerful resolve reminds him of.

As he throws the ball back into the circle at large, Erik says “Mr. Rosenberg” as there’s one or two of those in the group, as far as he recalls.

“No, your first name!”

“Erik.”

“ _No,_ ” Oppenheimer says, confused herself, “your own name! You’re Max, he’s Erich!”

She points at the rickety old man who’s caught the ball from Erik and now beams at her, and that’s when Erik realises his mistake.

“You’re Max, he’s Erich, and that’s the green ball, so if Ruth please...”

And that’s when Erik has enough.

“Nobody tells me what I’m to be called any more,” he says, and looks at her with loathing before he turns and stalks away. All the laughter in the circle, directed at Erik and Oppenheimer both, dies down immediately. She doesn’t try to follow him. She’s completely overcome with remorse as she thinks she’s triggered some trauma in him, and when Erik looks back from the door, some ancient crone (Ruth? Mrs. Greenblatt? Oh damn, as if it mattered at all who these old people are!) is trying to comfort her as she sobs.

Oh, if only he could rattle all the iron in the walls and doors, the locks and windows as he used to, but he can’t even feel it any more.

Charles must have felt like that, Erik muses as he strides angrily towards his room, when he realised he couldn’t feel his legs any more. 

Erik had just left, at that point. But Charles could always feel Erik, Erik’s mind and his unique mutation among the billions of baseline humans, unless Erik wore the helmet. The helmet is lost now, as Charles is, and completely unnecessary anyway, as it used to be an anti-Charles helmet, and there isn’t a Charles any more.

Erik doesn’t turn on the light in his room. He sits in his armchair the people here had lovingly brought from his old flat (never mind he’d bought it at a flea market only weeks before, looking for credible stuff old people would have, as he must pose as an old man now), and kicks the coffee table.

He’d slipped up, and only the presence of some doddery Erich had saved him.

Why is he bothering with this again? What could possibly be worth having survived Charles? Perhaps he should throw in the towel after all before he succumbs to the flirtation of some ancient Ruth from sheer unspeakable boredom. Is it really worth hanging on for this, the indignity and the childishness and the chess games with strangers he’d kill as soon as checkmate them, if there was the slightest advantage to be gained from it?

That’s when he feels it. The touch of a mind, the way he sometimes used to feel it when Charles was using Cerebro, and Erik wasn’t wearing the helmet, only fainter and more vaguely, as if Charles was fishing about and he wasn’t even sure he’d hooked the thing he was actually looking for.

_Erik? What happened to you?_

Erik decides that this must be dementia claiming him, as he’d seen Charles die and crumble to nothing before his very eyes. It had been so quick -- Erik had barked “Charles!” but he’d already been gone.

But the familiar presence in his mind stays, weak and wavering, but real and reassuring at the same time. Charles is alive?

Then everything is possible. Erik definitely has to stay around to find out more, and eventually act on it.

If Charles didn’t stay dead, who says Erik has to stay Cured?

Erik decides he doesn’t want to die today after all, but won’t go as far as to apologise to Oppenheimer. Let her eat kosher humble pie for a bit.

Erik gets up and leaves his room with his Stark pad, to find himself some coffee and another cat before casting out electronic (baseline human) tendrils to find out more.

Things are afoot. He’s not done yet.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my trusty beta [paceisthetrick](http://archiveofourown.org/users/paceisthetrick/pseuds/paceisthetrick), as always!


End file.
